On 15/12/10 10:40 PM, George Bonser wrote:
From: JC Dill Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 10:20 PM To: NANOG list Subject: Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
On 15/12/10 10:05 PM, George Bonser wrote:
If the customer pays the cost of the transport, a provider with better transport efficiency / quality ratio wins.
This (and everything that followed) assumes the customer has a choice of providers. For most customers who already have Comcast, they don't have any choice for similar broadband services (speeds). So open market principles don't come into play, and Comcast knows it. No, you misunderstood. It doesn't matter if you have only one internet service provider. If the end customer foots the bill, the incentive for innovation is for the *content* provider to strike a balance between quality and cost that the customers want. If the *content* provider foots the bill, innovation is driven in a way that the content providers want.
The customer *always* foots the bill in the end. It's just a matter of how many intermediaries there are between the bill-paying customer and the underlying service they are paying for. Customers clearly prefer to have the true costs of services hidden and obfuscated. Take a look at the byzantine way we pay for health care in the US today, versus how we paid for health care 50 years ago. Then take a look at the industry that has sprung up to wring ever more dollars out of consumers by insulating them from the true costs of health care. Repeat for the cost of body work on your car (paid for with insurance, with the "quality" (and thus cost) of repair being ever escalated because the consumer doesn't see the direct cost of the increased repair), the quality of food production (massive poultry houses where birds are routinely fed antibiotics and infected eggs lead to nationwide recalls) etc. Consumers are too insulated from the production and true costs, and don't realize how the market consolidation is taking away their choices AND producing ever lower quality of goods and services. Why should internet access be any different? There was a story on NPR the other day where the talking head spoke about how "consumers overwhelmingly want a do-not-track system". Hello?! Consumers also don't want spam. Can you point to a SINGLE case where CAN-SPAM actually stopped a significant amount of spam? The reason consumers have functioning email mailboxes isn't because of legislation stopping spam, it's because of ISPs implementing ever increasingly effective anti-spam techniques. Anyone who thinks a "do not track" legislation can have any possible measurable effect on how websites track users is simply ignorant about the magnitude of the problem, and how companies will simply outsource (ultimately to overseas companies) their "customer tracking" services to avoid needing to comply with any US laws. And how can the consumer know if their "do not track" request is being honored anyway? It's not like they get a popup every time a website tracks their activities. What customers *really* want, and what they gladly accept as long as it saves them a few pennies, are miles apart. (Which is why so many people blindly give their data to Facebook etc.) This is why I think the direction Comcast is going is ultimately going to win in the marketplace. Do I *want* to see Comcast win? No! But I think it's an inevitable trend. Customers are lazy. Customers are cheap. They will - en masse - support the lowest cost solution that *appears* to give them something of value, even when it's really not in their best interest. jc